Conclusion

In two years time, it is possible that Labor will be out of
power in every jurisdiction in Australia. With a seemingly ever-decreasing
number of voters and members, it is easy for supporters of the Party to become
disconsolate. However, Labor will always have one asset that will never
diminish; its history.

Labor’s history provides
important perspective on the scale of the threat posed by the rise in
prominence of The Greens. To this end, history suggests that while The Greens
are unlikely to usurp Labor’s role as the major party of the Left in Australia,
unless their agenda is confronted and rejected, they could do serious damage to
the electoral prospects of the progressive movement. Labor’s history also
provides practical lessons on how the party ought to engage with the threat
posed by The Greens. Importantly, Labor’s history offers warnings of the
electoral danger of giving into ideology and cutting the Party off from the
concerns of the mainstream of Australian voters. However, Labor’s history also
shows the futility of engaging in the fractious, emotional splits of the past
and the need for the threat of The Greens to be confronted in a way that does
not alienate future potential voters and supporters.

More than anything however, Labor Members and the Party’s
fellow travellers, Labor’s rich and meaningful history will always be a source
of solace and strength for those who study it closely. In a world in which
there are three media cycles in a day and the attrition rate amongst MPs, staff
and journalists has never been higher, it can sometimes feel like the
institutional memory of Australian politics does not stretch beyond the current
term of the Government. In this environment, it is easy to get caught up in the
idea that we are living in unique times and that our democracy has never seen the
likes of the forces that are buffeting the political actors who are currently
on stage. It is only when one consciously steps back and look at the long arc
of Australian political history, that it becomes clear that there are bigger,
more enduring trends at work. For better or for worse, over the past 120 years
in Australian progressive politics, those bigger trends have unfolded through
the Australian Labor Party. With the benefit of a historical perspective, Labor
members can take comfort from the fact that despite the Party’s current
difficulties, there is nothing in the emergence of The Greens to make one think
that this will not continue for the next 120 years.

As Paul Keating once said with an eye to the Party’s history:

‘We at least in the Labor Party know, that we are part of a
big story, which is also the story of our country. And what do they know?’

Responding to the Challenge of the Greens: Progressive Policy Making in the Real World

On the policy front, Labor must use its greater expertise
and experience of the realities of policy making to actively highlight the
areas in which The Greens’ policies produce outcomes contrary to the Party’s
purported progressive aims. There are numerous instances of such contradictions
that the ALP can choose from in this regard within The Greens’ voluminous
policy papers. One particularly egregious example can be seen in The Greens’
Higher Education policy that commits the party to:

"Abolish fees for educational services at public
universities for Australian students and forgive HECS debts and FEE-HELP debt
incurred at public universities.”

Even on the face of its own internal logic, the impact of this policy is deeply regressive. If one accepted (against 20 years of evidence to the contrary) that HECS fees discouraged those from lower socio-economic backgrounds from attending university, the effect of forgiving the outstanding HECS debts of those who attended university regardless is to deliver a massive financial windfall gain to those individuals who were not in fact discouraged from attending. The practical effect of this policy would be to deliver around $20 billion in windfall gains to the professional classes of doctors, lawyers, architects and accountants, for no public benefit.

Responding to a similar proposal to forgive student loans
that was floated in the United States the name of economic stimulus, Justin
Wolfers, a much lauded Australian-born economist at the Wharton School asked:

“If we are going to give money away, why on earth would we
give it to college grads? This is the one group who we know typically have high
incomes, and who have enjoyed income growth over the past four decades. The group who has been hurt over the past few
decades is high school dropouts. So my question for the proponents: Why give
money to college grads rather than the 15% of the population in poverty?

Conclusion: Worst. Idea. Ever. And I bet that the proponents
can’t find a single economist to support this idiotic idea.”

This is but one example of the outcome of The Greens’ policy
prescriptions failing to live up to their progressive billing. Similar
arguments can be made regarding the outcomes of The Greens policies in areas
including Solar Feed-In Tariffs, local planning controls, refugee policy, opposition
to the war in Afghanistan, and the termination of the ANZUS treaty to name but
a few examples. In this way, highlighting the perverse consequences of The
Greens’ policies rather than engaging in personal conflict with their members
and supporters, offers Labor a road map for competing for the support of
progressive voters without risking a repeat of the damaging divisions and
animosities of the past.

Responding to the Challenge of the Greens: Political Philosophy And the Case for Government

Philosophically, Labor must explicitly and forcefully make the
moral case for electoralism to progressive voters. In general, progressive
voters are highly engaged with politics and more interested in the
philosophical case for political actions than the typical voter. This presents
an opportunity to combat The Greens’ characterisation of Labor as a party of
Hollowmen who prioritise political self-interest over the moral consequences of
their political actions by demonstrating the benefits to the progressive
movement of securing government.

In this respect Labor must explicitly make the case that far
from being cynical or self-interested, the pursuit of Government is the moral
imperative upon which the modern progressive movement must rest. Labor must
emphasise, as Gough Whitlam famously told the Victorian Branch of the ALP, that
the principle of electoralism has always been the defining tradition of the
Labor Party:

“There is nothing more disloyal to the traditions of Labor
than the new heresy that power is not important, or that the attainment of
political power is not fundamental to our purposes. The men who formed the
Labor Party in the 1890s knew all about power. They were not ashamed to seek it
and they were not embarrassed when they won it.”

Labor must assert that the collective achievements of the
Australian progressive movement over the past 120 years are a function of
Labor’s ability to secure and retain Government. It has been the touch stone of
the achievements of all the great Labor leaders. In this respect, Labor must aggressively call
out the Australian left’s habit of engaging in what Christopher Hitchens has described
as ‘grave robbing’, the stealing and repurposing of the legacies of Labor’s
past heroes. Current Labor leaders are frequently held up for comparison against
a revisionist imagining of Labor’s past in which electoral matters are absence
and ideological purity was the order of the day. Not un-coincidentally, this
golden era has always existed just beyond the immediate memory and experiences
of those proclaiming it.

In reality, the heroes of Labor’s past against which the
ideological integrity of Labor’s current MPs is compared were invariably themselves
electoralists rather than ideologues. When talking about John Curtin’s record
as a party hero, few progressives raise the fact that he was vilified by the
left for opposing the existing ALP party platform in order to send conscript
soldiers overseas to fight in the Pacific theatre. Fewer still raise the fact
that when confronted with ongoing opposition from the left in caucus, Curtin
simply stated that “what is irrelevant can be endured”. When lauding Chifley’s commitment to the
Light on the Hill, few modern left wingers bring up his use of the military to
break up a communist led strike in the Australian coal industry in 1949. Fewer
still recall the “whatever it takes” electoral practices that he employed to
fight Lang Labor during the 1930s. Yet these electorally critical actions were
all essential to the ability of these great leaders to secure Government.

In a similar way, the Whitlam Government is constantly cited
by those on the left as an example of ideological rigor that ought to be
followed by the modern ALP.
Yet most conveniently forget that Whitlam's famous ‘crash or crash
through’ comment was a reference not to the parliamentary obstructionism of
Malcolm Fraser’s Liberal Party, but instead to the ideological obstructionism
of the left wing of 1960s ALP. Indeed, Whitlam’s leadership was made on his electoralist
resistance to the Left, most famously when he castigated the hard left
controlled 1967 Victorian State Conference for their disregard for the
consequences of electoral failure.

“We euphemise deep disasters as ‘temporary setbacks; the
nearer Labor approaches electoral annihilation, the more fervently we proclaim
its indestructibility. We juggle with percentages, distributions and voting
systems to show how we shall, infallibly, at the present rate of progress, win
office in 1998. Worse, we construct a philosophy of failure, which finds in
defeat a form of justification and proof of the purity of our principles.
Certainly the impotent are pure.”

Another current darling of many a green voting modern
progressives, Paul Keating, was infamously hostile to the Left’s resistance of
his efforts to modernise Labor policy. Few remember now that Keating summed up
the agenda of the left wing of the 1980s ALP as being about:

“wider nature strips, more trees and we’ll all make wicker
baskets in Balmain. Then we’ll all live in renovated terraces in Balmain and
we’ll have the arts and crafts shops and everything else is bad and evil.”

Keating long insisted that his role was to resist the Left’s
efforts to shift the focus of the ALP from electoralism to ideological
orthodoxy, stating on one occasion that

“(The Left) are trying to make my party into something other
than it is… They’re appendages. That’s why I’ll never abandon ship, and never
let those people capture it.”

To be sure, Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam and Keating all were
champions of the Labor movement who achieved great things for the progressive
cause. But they all understood the self-evident truth that without government,
and all of the compromises, trade-offs and sacrifices to obtain majority
support that it entails, they could achieve nothing.

They understood the truth of George Orwell’s
characterisation of the uneasiness that many progressives feel when
contemplating the necessities of political engagement:

“We see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing
what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering
belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and
evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think,
get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never
do more than decide which of two evils is the lesser, and there are some
situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.”

Or to put it more succinctly, as Governor Willie stark did
in Robert Penn Warren’s magisterial account of the political practice, “All the
King’s Men”:

"You got to make good out of bad. That’s all there is
to make it with."

Instead, Labor must confidently assert that the only thing
in politics that can be definitively labelled as immoral in democratic politics
is prioritising a desire to be seen to do good over a willingness to actually
do what is required to achieve good. It is those who put their own feelings of
purity and ideological superiority above the practical necessities of the
democratic process who are the real cynics. To this end, as David Foster
Wallace has written, the most common mistake of ostensibly well intentioned
progressives is:

“not conceptual or ideological but spiritual and
rhetorical—their narcissistic attachment to assumptions that maximize their own
appearance of virtue tends to cost them both the theater and the war.”[i]

It is well to ask whether one is taking a political position
out of self-interest, but it’s worth recognising when doing so that an
individual’s self-interest can encompass a range of needs. Knowingly adopting
an unpopular position is frequently just as self-interested and philosophically
hollow as adopting a position that is likely to attract popular support.

Lessons from History: The Risks of a Divided Progressive Movement

The final lesson that the ALP must learn from its history of responding
to left wing challenges within the progressive movement is that while The
Greens must be actively confronted and their agenda rejected, the ALP must
ensure that the necessary confrontation does not alienate future Labor voters
and members. In this respect, Labor has handled past divisions in the
progressive movement poorly. All too often, Labor leaders like Kidston, Lang
and Evatt have responded to internal divisions with an aggression and personal
acrimony that split the party and the progressive movement for years to come. The
early signs of such a fractious division between the supporters of the ALP and those
of The Greens are already observable.

Many in the Labor party, particularly those in the inner
cities, resent the way that the Greens actively court Labor voters, without the
constraint of having to make their appeal palatable to the broader population.
The feeling that The Greens are opportunists betraying the broader progressive
movement’s electoral prospects in pursuit of their own narrow political self
interest is palpable and the source of much anger. The Greens’ tendency to
frame their campaigns as black and white morality plays in which the ALP is
condemned not simply for adopting a different electoral strategy or policy
approach, but as being actively morally inferior to the Greens particularly
grates. As Proust once said, those that we hate the most are those who are most
like ourselves, but with our faults uncured. Given that to many on the Labor
side, the world view of The Greens is that of a left wing student politician who
never confronted the realities of democratic politics, it’s easy to see why
there is so much animosity towards the party within the ALP.

Despite this, Labor must learn from its’ history to resist
the temptation to engage in personal attacks on The Greens. The animosity that
has accompanied historic splits within the Australian progressive movement over
nationalisation, conscription, the response to the depression and communism has
wastefully diverted the energies and distracted the attentions of those who
ought to be working for Labor’s electoralist mission. Labor members should
remind themselves that one of John Curtin’s first acts as Leader of the ALP was
to establish a series of ALP Unity Conferences in which the motions to expel
Lang Labor supporters were rescinded and Lang Labor MPs were invited to rejoin
the Labor caucus. The resulting détente brought the McKell Government into
power in New South Wales and the Curtin led Labor Party into power federally not
long after. If the rancour and betrayals of a party split could be successfully
overcome in this way in the name of progressive solidarity, so too can the petty
frustrations of responding to opportunism and hypocrisy.

Instead of engaging in counter-productive ad hominem
attacks, Labor must adopt an approach to confronting The Greens that keeps an
eye to a future in which these voters (and members) are brought back into the
fold. Instead of either belittling The Greens and their supporters, or engaging
in an unwinnable ideological auction for their support, Labor should seek to
confront The Greens asymmetrically, competing for the support of these voters
using the comparative advantages of the ALP in political philosophy and policy
making.

Lessons from History: The Risks of an Ideologically Isolated Labor Party

During the first ten years of the ALP, when the future
viability of the ALP was last discussed as openly as it is today, an intense
debate developed within the Party about the electoral and parliamentary strategy
that Labor should employ to advance its policy goals. Denis Murphy described the
four most prominent theories as being:

“Labor should remain on the cross benches, like the Irish
Nationalists in the House of Commons, and support whichever of the two existing
parties would agree to implementing parts of the Labor platform;

Since the Labor Party could not hope, for some time, to win
sufficient votes to govern in its own right, it should seek to achieve
necessary reforms through judicious alliances with reform-minded Liberals;

The Labor Party should merge with or remain a part of the
Liberal party;

As it would be only when Labor gained office in its own
right that it could bring about any meaningful or major reforms, the party
should eschew all alliances and maintain a separate and independent identity”.

Given that Labor has now outgrown the option of sitting on
the cross benches and that the ideological gulf between the ALP and The Greens
is too significant for a merger to be a realistic possibility, options 2 and 4
remain as the only viable strategies for the modern ALP.In the 1890s, Labor chose the fourth option, to seek office
in its own right and to see off all progressive challengers, and has pursued it
for the better part of 100 years. It was the right decision for Labor and the
progressive movement then, and offers a template for Labor’s future now.

In response to the increasing prominence of The Greens, Labor
must explicitly reaffirm its strategy of seeking office in its own right, with
all of the tactical implications that entails. History has repeatedly taught
that when ideology has drawn Labor’s focus away from the need to obtain
majority support, the progressive movement has achieved nothing in the face of
long term conservative governments. Labor must not make the mistakes of
previous Labor leaders like Arthur Calwell who acquiesced to the agendas of the
left wing movements without regard to their electoral consequences. As the
former UK Labour leader, Hugh Gaitskell has warned progressives:“we can never
go farther than we can persuade at least half of the people to go.”

In this regard, Labor should not be under any illusions as
to the electoral viability of The Greens’ agenda. The ANU’s Australian
Electoral Study has found that on a left-right scale running from 0 (far left)
to 10 (far right) while voters on average place themselves in the centre of the
scale, at 5.03, they place the Greens on average at 3.3; significantly more
left wing than the mean voter. Older, but more granular academic research shows that the attitudes of Greens
candidates on specific policy issues are substantially to the left of the views
of not only the broader electorate, but even of those of self-identified Labor
voters[i].
For example, given a choice between reducing taxes or spending more on social
services, 93% of Greens candidates favoured spending more on social services.
Labor voters, however, were split fairly evenly, with roughly a third favouring
reduced taxes, a third favouring more social services, and a third indicating
no real preference. Similarly, only 26.5% of Greens candidates agreed or
strongly disagreed with the statement that high income tax makes people less
willing to work hard, while in contrast 66.6% of Labor voters did so. This
ideological gulf seems likely to explain the apparent ceiling on The Greens
vote, even in the most fortuitous of electoral environments, revealed by recent
polling and electoral data. Labor should take note of this electoral disconnect
and not embrace the electoral irrelevance of this agenda.

Ideological isolation is a particular risk in a situation in
which Labor is confronted by a left wing movement that is active electorally.
Labor can never be ‘more left’ than The Greens on totemic ideological issues.
No matter how far Labor moves to the left, The Greens will always be able to
move further across themselves, continuing to harvest the votes of those who
are motivated by left wing orthodoxy. However, by engaging in an ideological
bidding war with a party who is pitching to only a narrow segment of the voting
population, Labor can very easily lose the votes of the vast majority of voters
who are not motivated by these issues, driving them into the camp of the
conservatives.

As the former Finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, a Labor
figure who has had more cause to contemplate the rise of the Greens than most,
warned:

“The Greens have appropriated elements of the belief system
of Whitlam Labor and, free of the constraints of seeking to govern, intensified
them to a point where they have no prospect of attracting majority support.
Labor can only compete with Green grandstanding at the price of an indefinite
period in opposition”[ii]

The current electoral situation in which Labor has lost
nearly 1.3 million primary votes to the Tony Abbott led Liberal Party and only
around 140,000 votes to The Greens ought to give the current party leadership
pause for thought in this respect.

As such, in response to the increasing prominence of The
Greens, Labor must, in the words of Dennis Murphy, ‘eschew all alliances and
maintain a separate and independent identity’. In the modern context this means
that Labor must rule out any form of governing arrangement, formal or informal,
with The Greens. Unsurprisingly, building on the current formalised ‘alliance’
arrangements with The Greens appears to be a key strategic objective for the Greens.
Robert Manne, one of their most vocal cheer leaders of late has gone so far as
to assert that:

“It is obvious that if there is to be a progressive politics
in Australia, its sine qua non is an informal version of what the Europeans
call the “Red-Green alliance”

While such an arrangement may well offer a rosy future for
the Greens, as predicted by Labor strategists in the 1890s, such arrangements
presents great danger for Labor. Labor must reject the tactical convenience of
such an approach in the name of the long term strategic good of the progressive
movement. As Labor has learnt over the past 12 months, a state of parliamentary
alliance with The Greens is the worst of both worlds for the ALP. On the one
hand, Labor surrenders the agency of progressive reform. Regardless of the
actual distribution of responsibility within the alliance, The Greens are able
to claim sole credit with left leaning voters for all progressive reforms
initiated by the Government. In this way, a Red-Green governing alliance would deliver
the inner cities to The Greens in perpetuity.

On the other hand, and more significantly, governing with
The Greens adds to the degree of difficulty in Labor’s efforts to fight the
conservatives for the middle ground of Australian politics. The Greens are not
a moderating alliance partner of the style of the Australian Democrats. As they
freely admit, The Greens role in an alliance with Labor is not to “Keep the
Bastards Honest”, but instead to suck its host party dry. Under such an
arrangement, Labor forfeits the power to set the political agenda and to choose
the issues on which it engages the opposition. As a result, issues that are
important to a minority of voters but risk alienating mainstream voters (eg
ending mandatory detention of refugees) are permanently parked at the front of
the political agenda, perpetually sapping Labor’s political capital. The
inconsistent electoral objectives of Labor and The Greens and the competitive
dynamics between the parties mean that any alliance can only ever be destructive
to the broader progressive movement’s ability to secure government.

In this respect, it seems certain that the with the benefit
of hindsight, the current Labor Government’s formalised alliance agreement with
the Australian Greens will be seen as the greatest strategic mistake of the Gillard
Government. While Paul Kelly was no doubt exaggerating when he stated that “the
once great Labor Party passes into history with this deal”, the alliance model
is clearly electorally unsustainable for the ALP in the long run.

The reality is that Labor has little to lose and much to gain from explicitly saying that it will have nothing to do with The Greens. Even the absence of preference swap deals with The Greens in the lower house is unlikely to have any significant effect on Labor’s electoral prospects. ABC elections expert Antony Green has analysed preference flow data from preceding elections and has found that assuming a Greens primary vote of 10%, Green how to vote directions are worth only 0.3% of the vote. Ultimately, securing Greens’ preferences should not be a major priority for Labor’s electoral strategists. Certainly, it should not be prioritised over efforts to win back the support of the larger block of voters who have left the party to support Tony Abbott’s Opposition. There is indisputably widespread dysfunction in the modern ALP, however the dysfunction is not the instinct to retain government. To this end, Labor must make the moral case for electoralism as the least-worst hope for the progressive movement. By focusing on remaining relevant to the interests, hopes and dreams of the majority of Australian voters, much can be achieved through the use of Government to achieve incremental progressive reform.

Lessons from History: The Limited Scale of the Threat

The first lesson from history is that while left wing
insurgent groups have been able to divide the progressive vote and damage the
ALP, as Lang Labor found, there is a hard ceiling on the growth of their vote. The
Greens may be able to woo voters within ideologically sympathetic geographic
enclaves, but they are unlikely to grow their level of electoral support beyond
around 15% of the national vote without significantly moderating their agenda
and broadening their appeal. An examination of Australian polling and electoral
data over the past decade provides substantial empirical support for this view.

Peter Brent, a well known scion of the psephological
blogosphere under his pseudonym, Mumble, recently compared a time series of ten
years of Labor and Greens poll and election results and noted that:

“Since late 2001, Greens have tended to do well in the polls
when Labor has done badly... The Greens feed on dissatisfaction with the ALP
from (in crude terms) “the left”. Their chances of winning more lower house
seats at the next election largely depend on how badly the ALP does.”

As such, the data show that in 2001 when September 11 and
the Tampa saw Labor’s vote crash, the Greens’ vote spiked by 5 percentage
points. In contrast, in 2007, when Kevin07 had Labor ascendant, the Greens’
vote increased only 1 percentage point on their 2004 result. The pattern continued
in the 2010 election, when a calamitous election campaign marred by internal
Labor recriminations led to the Greens’ vote jumping 4 percentage points to
around 13% of the national vote (11.76% in the House of Representatives and
13.11% in the Senate).

However, it is important to note that while The Greens’ vote
tends to increase when Labor’s vote falls, this relationship is not linear.
More often, only a small proportion of the fall in Labor’s support transfers
into increased support for The Greens. Significantly,
despite widespread dissatisfaction with the Gillard government, unparalleled
prominence of Greens’ spokesmen in the hung parliament and major wins on their
key policy issues, the Greens’ surveyed level of support has barely increased
at all since the 2010 election, bouncing between 12 and 15%.

Instead, as can be seen from the work of another online
psephologist, Scott Steel (AKA Possum’s Pollytics), a weighted aggregation of
major pollsters as at 28 September 2011 (around Labor’s nadir), shows that while
Labor’s Primary support had fallen by 9.7 percentage points since the 2010
election, the Greens’ primary support had increased by only 0.6 percentage
points. For every ten voters who had left Labor since the 2010 election, only one had
gone to the Greens and five had gone to the Tony Abbott led Liberal Party.

Similar patterns can be observed in the recent Victorian,
New South Wales and Queensland State elections. In Victoria, despite a major
Greens’ campaign to build on their record 2010 Federal Election result by
electing a number of lower house MPs in inner city Melbourne electorates, The
Greens’ primary vote increased by only 1.17 percentage points to 11.21% of the
state wide result, a result that failed to produce a single lower house seat. Meanwhile,
Labor’s primary vote had fallen by 6.81 percentage points on a statewide basis,
more than half of which was picked up by the Liberal and National parties.

The 2011 New South Wales state election result told a
particularly damning story of the limits of The Greens’ electoral appeal.
Despite confronting what was universally regarded as a historically incompetent
State Labor Government and an utterly demoralised Labor organisation, The
Greens were only able to increase its primary vote by 1.33 percentage points
(to 10.3%) in the face of a 13.43 percentage point fall in Labor’s primary vote.

Tellingly, as ABC elections analyst Antony Green subsequentlynoted, The Greens were not able to capitalise on the collapse of the Labor
Primary in Labor held seats:

“There was a swathe of inner-city seats such as Coogee and
Heffron where a collapse in Labor’s first preference vote could have put the
Greens into second place. Instead the Green vote was static and all the change
in vote was from Labor to Liberal. Even in the one seat the Greens did win,
Balmain, the victory came about entirely because Labor’s collapse in support
was so large that Labor fell to third place”.

Ultimately, even left leaning former Labor voters who had
given up on the ALP in disgust, did not opt for The Greens. The Liberal Party increased
their primary support by a total of 11.64 percentage points in the election;
ten times the increase in The Greens’ vote.

A similar pattern can be seen in the most recent Queensland
election in which a swing against the Labor Party of 15.4 percentage points
(leaving a primary vote of just 26.8%) was accompanied by a fall in The Greens
primary vote of 1.2 percentage points (to a primary of just 7.2%).

Consistent with the experience of all movements that have
challenged the Labor Party from the left since Federation, recent polling and
electoral evidence strongly suggests that the Greens’ appeal, at least as the
party is currently orientated, is limited to a small sub-set of ideologically sympathetic
Labor voters. In total, across the
Victorian, New South Wales and Queensland election results and polling since
the 2010 Federal election, Labor has lost an average of 11.33 percentage points
of primary support while the Greens have increased their primary support by an
average of only 0.475 percentage points.

Given the parallels between the rise in the prominence of
the Greens and Labor’s historic experience with left wing movements inside and
outside the ALP, what lessons can the Party learn from its history to avoid the
long periods of damaging division that have often accompanied these movements?